Billions (TV Program)

Mike shows just how ruthless he is willing to be for sake of expediency.Season 7, Episode 8: ‘The Owl’Mike Prince is trying to do the right thing. A man for whom his wife, Andy, cares deeply has had a mountain-climbing accident in the Himalayas. He is injured and alone, in the path of a storm, running out of food and stranded on the Chinese side of the mountains.Mike has the resources to arrange a successful extraction, even under these physically and politically dangerous conditions. To rescue the man means risking an international incident and potentially ending his presidential campaign. Not to rescue him means the man will die, and Andy will lose someone who is more to her than a friend.So Mike does what you or I might like to think we would do under these circumstances. Risks be damned, he orders the rescue mission — confident that his seasoned pros won’t be caught but prepared to take the political hit if they do.At least, that’s the story it seems he’s telling himself, until circumstances on the ground change — or rather, until he changes circumstances on the ground.Despite his distaste for old-money blue bloods, Mike is dragged by his political adviser, Bradford, to a semiannual forest conclave for the rich and powerful called the Owl. In this secluded environment — clearly modeled after the Bohemian Grove, right down to the choice of its avian mascot — the nearly all-male elite can mix, mingle, urinate in the open air, go streaking through the snow, participate in tests of strength with offensive names and generally enjoy the rights and privileges of being right and privileged.There are two star attractions at this winter’s gathering, besides Prince himself. One is his chief political rival, the centrist Democratic governor Nancy Dunlop (Melina Kanakaredes, having a whale of a time playing a swaggering jerk). The other is the group’s ultimate political kingmaker and gray eminence, George Pike IV (Griffin Dunne, as quietly wolfish and menacing as a well-cast Imperial officer in a “Star Wars” project). Known to friends and foes alike as “Fourth,” Pike is there to decide which of these self-conceptualized common-sense mavericks deserves his backing.He gets his answer in the most horrifying sequence this show has seen since Bobby Axelrod paid a doctor to let a patient die. During a fireside chat in which Gov. Dunlop pushes for a nuclear-free world, Prince mocks the idea as hippy-dippy stuff and forcefully argues for the embrace of first-strike strategies. How would he know when to call down the fire? Well, he says, he would have to be sure, and being sure about things is why the people will want his finger on the button in the first place.Watching this room full of rich men discuss the incineration of millions as if they’re swapping fantasy football strategies is repulsive; there’s no other way to put it. It’s everything wrong with how decisions are made in this country, as wealthy people in no danger of facing consequences for their actions debate idly which lives are and aren’t worthless when stacked against the overriding importance of their own comfort and ambitions.Prince in particular talks as if he were purposefully demonstrating the wisdom of Chuck, who is also in attendance with his old-guard father; his friend and lieutenant Ira; and somehow, Charles’s personal Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Swerdlow. Chuck’s quest to stop Prince from reaching the White House — like the parallel sabotage campaign led by Wendy, Wags and Taylor — is predicated on the idea that no man this free of self-doubt belongs anywhere near power, let alone the kind of power present in the nuclear football. (A friendly but rueful conversation between Chuck and Prince as they pee against some trees hashes this point out directly.)Unfortunately for Chuck, Fourth doesn’t see things his way. In Prince’s tough talk about the bomb, Fourth hears a man willing to thumb his nose at the “nanny state” — a man truly made for a world where there is no black and white, no good and evil. Like many to-the-manner-born elites, Fourth is a natural constituent for a form of politics run by “big men with agendas — not the populace, not the rule of law and certainly not the voters.”Chuck leaves, visibly shaken. If self-styled guardians of the soul of the nation like Fourth don’t understand that they’re selling that soul by backing Prince, what hope does he have?Which raises another question: Is “Billions” the most chilling show on television right now? And I’m not talking about the wintry setting of this week’s episode. Like virtually every episode since Prince’s presidential ambitions became clear, “The Owl” casts an unflinching eye on the danger posed to American democracy by megalomaniacal strongmen, by the ultra-rich, and especially by the people who are both.In a sense, this is covered ground for the show. Chuck already took on billionaire overreach when he battled Bobby Axelrod for five seasons. His conflicts with the pointedly unnamed presidential administration in power in the show’s universe from 2017 to 2021, represented by odious officials like Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat and Todd Krakow, made a clear argument that authoritarianism, corruption and reactionary politics are correlated phenomena.But since Axe never got directly involved in politics, and since the former president was never depicted as an on-screen character, “Billions” has never had such an opportunity to explore all these issues up close by embodying them in one man. And in an episode that depicts the threat he presents in the starkest, most existential terms imaginable, it’s worth noting what that one man actually does.Mike Prince was trying to do the right thing, you remember. Even at the Owl, he, Bradford and Scooter hovered over his phone, listening for updates on the rescue mission. Then something goes south, just as the chopper reaches the stranded hiker: the Chinese military shows up out of nowhere, taking the man into custody and forcing Prince’s team to abort the mission lest they get involved in a shooting war with a foreign government.But here’s the thing: No one knows better than Andy that what Mike Prince wants, Mike Prince gets. If this rescue didn’t work, then, it’s because Mike didn’t want it to work. Confronted with this, Prince admits it: He tipped off the Chinese government and ended the mission after Fourth encouraged him to resolve the situation without provoking the Chinese government — or being seen as surrendering to them either.“You wanted him off the mountain,” he rationalizes half-heartedly. “He’s off the damn mountain.” The Himalayas are cold. Mike Prince is colder.Loose changeAs dark as this episode gets, there’s also a scene in which Kanakaredes and Rick Hoffman get on the floor and leg-wrestle with their shirts off. In general, when presented with two roads diverging in a wood, “Billions” takes the path more ridiculous, and that has made all the difference.To its credit, “Billions” has long presented sexual fetishism and kink not as a source of comedy (OK, not only as a source of comedy), let alone as a marker of deep psychological dysfunction. It has always been presented more as just a part of the sex lives of countless basically normal people (OK, normal by “Billions” standards). It picks up this torch again in a subplot involving Wags’s discovery that he has a certain scatological fetish that initially sends his wife, Chelz (Caroline Day), fleeing from the room. (“Stop saying words out of your mouth!” she stammers in one of the best lines of the night.) When Wendy explains to Chelz that the fetish represents Wags’s desire to be loved unconditionally, despite even the most repugnant parts of himself, Chelz is into it — but for Wags, the explanation kills the mood, like a magician revealing how the trick is done. And I call shenanigans! Figuring out why you’re into the weird stuff you’re into makes it more fun, not less.“I love breathing the same country air that Goldwater did.” Only Charles Rhoades Sr. could describe getting back to nature in these terms.“Ham can cram in with Woof,” says Charles at one point, referring to reshuffled sleeping arrangements among his Owl buddies. With nicknames like that, this is possibly the most “old-money Ivy League alumnus” thing anyone has ever said on television.When Prince learns the identity of Andy’s missing friend, whom he realizes is one of her open-marriage romances, he says flatly: “Ah, Derek. Good old Derek.” It’s good to hear the note of hurt and embarrassment in his voice; it’s an all-too-rare sign that he’s human.The episode ends with an image of hooded, chanting Owl members setting the towering wooden statue of their mascot ablaze. It’s a creepy image but also a gorgeous one. “Billions” is a very good-looking show; I can think of a few fantasy epics that could learn a thing or two from how it shot those cloaked figures in the torch-lit snow. More

Philip gets a hard lesson from the coldblooded sharks around him about the laws of nature.Season 7, Episode 7: ‘DMV’Well, that was a nasty bit of business.One of the best episodes of “Billions” in recent memory, “DMV” — named after the government agency turned into an unlikely bed of low-stakes graft and influence-peddling by the Rhoades family — shows the depths to which many of the show’s leading players will sink to get what they want. Even if their desires are relatively high-minded, the depths remain the same.Philip gets a turn in the spotlight this week when he reels in Prince Cap’s latest whale: bioengineered, self-repairing concrete, invented by one of his mentors in college, Dr. Mike Rulov (Timothy Busfield). Thrilled by the benefits such a material would present for America’s crumbling infrastructure, to say nothing of how rich it would make them all, Philip pitches the idea to Prince, who loves it.A little too much, unfortunately. It’s such a great invention, with such potential for positive change in the world, that Mike insists on owning it lock, stock and barrel. If Rulov demurs, Prince is prepared to snap up related projects and sue Rulov for infringement, a practice called “patent sharking.”Though stunned at Prince’s “blitzkrieg” tactics, Philip tries to play good cop. With the legal and financial resources of one of the smaller G7 nations, Prince would make the new concrete a bigger deal than Rulov could, even with his own high-rollers backing him. But there was clearly no chance of such a sale, even before Prince started making veiled threats. Rulov is simply not the kind of person willing to sell off something into which he has poured so much of himself.When Philip dutifully relays this information to Prince, it only provides the billionaire with more ammo. If Rulov cares about the concrete so much, Prince reasons, then tying it up in litigation for years will force him to sell because of his simple but irresistible desire to see his creation out in the world. Not that Mike is in any hurry for that to happen, even if he wins the fight: At the suggestion of the increasingly sinister Kate Sacker, he considers keeping the technology under wraps until he can roll it out as part of his 2028 re-election campaign. Such is the transactional nature of Mike’s do-gooding at this point.Desperate, Philip turns to Wendy — not for her advice, although that’s the front he puts up, but rather for her connection to Chuck. He knows that if he tells her the whole story, she will reach out to her ex, who will see an opportunity to stick it to Prince.But Philip’s hope that Chuck can shut down the entire patent-sharking sector is a pipe dream. All Chuck can do is have a friend at the Defense Department classify the patent as a matter of national security, seize Rulov’s efforts, and prevent either man from being the sole controller of such an important invention. Of course, the government will most likely sit on it forever, benefiting no one. But if that’s what it takes to stop Prince from getting his hands on this potential game-changer, so be it.Even after this debacle, Philip still wants nothing to do with the plot against Prince, the existence of which Wendy intimates to him after many a knowing glance between herself and Taylor. Philip storms out of her office, all but yelling, “Deniability! Deniability!” with his fingers in his ears.Two parallel story lines echo these abuses of power. In one, Charles Sr. and his grandson, Kevin, are arrested when Charles attempts to bribe a Department of Motor Vehicles employee (Patrick Fischler) into giving Kevin a passing grade on his driver’s test. Chuck throws his weight around, cuts a sweetheart deal with the district attorney, lands the outraged DMV employee a promotion and joins Wendy at Kevin’s next test in his father’s place. Everyone wins, except anyone who thinks we’re all equal in the eyes of the law.Meanwhile, after the disastrous “truth-telling sessions” that saw the Prince Cap foot soldiers tear their boss to shreds, they express discomfort with the idea of Mike conducting the annual performance reviews. But it doesn’t stop there. Banding together, they elect Victor and Rian to tell the committee Mike assembles to take his place — Wags, Scooter, Taylor and Philip — that they reject the committee’s authority to conduct the reviews. They pitch postponing them for a year and detaching their annual comp from the review process in the meantime. Mike caves and even throws them a gala casino night as a morale-building exercise.Or so it seems. In reality, he and Scooter have colluded to have the whole evening recorded, employing the real-life poker ace Vanessa Selbst to analyze their behavior and risk patterns — a performance review without the consent of the performers. Judging from Victor’s and Rian’s reactions, this has exactly the effect on morale you would expect it to.But here’s the thing, as Chuck explains to Philip: In this world, there are harbor seals, like Rulov, and there are sharks, like Prince. Whether it’s running a promising start-up out of business in order to seize it for himself, or making an end-run around his staff’s expressed desires just because he can, Prince will go in for the kill. “Sharks will shark,” Chuck says ruefully. “Harbor seals will harbor seal. That is the way of the ocean.” At this point, everyone’s out in the deep water, watching President Prince’s dorsal fin get closer and closer.Loose changeCharles Sr. gets the biggest laugh lines of the night, twice over. First there’s the precise way he chooses to express his righteous indignation upon being arrested: “This is ridiculous! I was social friends with Robert Moses!” (Charles either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that Moses’s reputational stock has somewhat fallen since their last soirée.)Then there’s the deft way Charles gets Chuck to focus on his own parental neglect in failing to take Kevin to the test — rather than on Charles’s own literally criminal behavior. “Who’s the [expletive] now?” he asks before repeating it more slowly for emphasis: “Who’s … the [expletive] … now?” Chuck’s teary-eyed failure to recognize just how ridiculous this is shows how effective a manipulator Charles remains.What a delight to see Fischler, an actor who in years past cemented his status as one of the screen’s most memorable actors in the space of just two scenes. “Mad Men” viewers will recall his turn as the insult comic Jimmy Barrett, whose dressing down of Don Draper for sleeping with his wife — “You’re garbage, and you know it” — all but flays off the ad man’s skin. Meanwhile, David Lynch fans, or anyone familiar with a “scariest scenes of all time” listicle, know him as the man from the “Winkie’s dream” sequence in “Mulholland Drive,” in which his portrayal of a man facing his worst nightmare is as convincing as it is unnerving.Which members of the Prince Cap Movie Night crew understand that “The Wolf of Wall Street” is intended as a cautionary tale rather than a how-to manual? According to Wags, they are Kate, Victor, and Rian — not that it has stopped any of the three from acting rather wolfish.It’s fun to see the folks on the floor form a sort of pop-up union to collectively fight against the performance reviews. The “Hot Labor Summer” continues, even in “Billions”-land.Normally I’d come down pretty hard on a needle drop as narratively obvious as playing R.E.M.’s “Drive” after a kid passes his driving test, but I’m choosing to believe the song was chosen not for its title but for its somber tone, reflective of the mood of the rest of the episode. Otherwise, “I Can’t Drive 55” by Sammy Hagar was sitting right there. More

The insurrectionists at Prince Cap aren’t doing a great job of slowing Mike down. But Chuck might just have a new redheaded ace up his sleeve.Season 7, Episode 6: ‘The Man in the Olive Drab T-shirt’“The irresistible force meets the immovable object.” This quote should be familiar to Chuck Rhoades. As this week’s episode of “Billions” goes to great lengths to point out, Chuck is fan of professional wrestling. He would no doubt recall the wrestling commentator Gorilla Monsoon excitedly describing the clash between Hulk Hogan and his friend turned nemesis Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III with these exact words. Indeed, Chuck’s erstwhile ally, the Russian oligarch Grigor Andolov (John Malkovich), references the match by name during this very episode.But the sentiment should be a familiar one to Chuck as well. There he is at the beginning of this week’s episode, on a remote airstrip in Iceland, staring down his old nemesis, the fugitive billionaire Bobby Axelrod. Generally speaking, when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, a clash occurs. This time, however, the meeting is agreed upon in advance and pursued with a level of politeness, even honor, of which I doubted either man was capable.At any rate, by the time the closing credits roll, neither one has tried to body slam the other, figuratively or otherwise.That’s the best thing about Chuck and Bobby’s big reunion, actually: the lack of fireworks. Sure, their meeting is set against the spectacular, glowing green backdrop of the aurora borealis, but that’s as showy as the scene gets. This isn’t the Bride finally tracking down Bill, it’s two guys who dislike but respect each other, seeing if they can’t do a little “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” business. A fiery throw-down might have been satisfying on a lizard-brain level, but with few exceptions, these are not lizard-brained men.At any rate, Bobby has found himself with a Grigor Andolov problem. Despite Axe’s role in having Andolov expelled from the United States, the two have found themselves on the same end of an arms deal with Ukraine. That Andolov is acting against his own government, one not known to tolerate dissent, much less outright treason, weighs heavily on his mind. But so does the divorce proceeding brought against him in New York court.Unless Grigor can show up in person to contest the case, he tells Bobby, he’ll lose a fortune. And unless Bobby agrees to help him, Bobby will lose his life. So Axe swallows his pride and, using Wendy as a proxy, makes contact with Chuck, whom he knows has the legal know-how to allow a wanted man like Andolov back into the States. For his part, Chuck feels it’s a deal worth making if it puts Axe in his debt.Unfortunately, what’s good for Axe and Andolov is bad for, well, pretty much everyone else: Solicitor General Adam DiGiulio, Attorney General Dave Mahar of New York, Gov. Bob Sweeney of New York (Matt Servitto) and even the slimy ex-treasury secretary Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), who is using his hedge fund to bankroll Andolov’s ex. And it turns out that that’s not all he’s doing with Andolov’s ex.How best to placate all these political power players? How can Chuck make Andolov look like enough of a good guy to get through customs but enough of a bad guy to get a pop (that’s wrestling jargon for a positive reaction) from the Kremlin, which already suspects that he is playing for the other teamFor advice, Chuck turns to Paul Levesque, also known as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, best known as Triple H, the professional wrestler turned chief content officer and head of creative for the W.W.E. Hunter, as Chuck calls him, is known to fans for having a great mind for the business. Who better to coach the group on how they can all come out looking like winners — the kind of outcome the new, relatively enlightened Chuck Rhoades prefers at any rate?The answer turns out to be rather simple. Chuck gets Andolov into the country as an expert witness in a different case. He allows the menacing robber baron to threaten to throw Krakow off a rooftop unless he puts the kibosh on the divorce filing and stops shtupping Grigor’s ex-wife. Then Chuck makes a big show of arresting him, at which point Andolov makes an even bigger show of being the most comical pro-Russian “heel” (wrestling jargon for villain) since Nikolai Volkoff. The American politicians look good to their domestic audience, Andolov looks good to his, and the slimy Krakow survives to ooze another day. Everyone’s a winner!The same cannot be said for the participants in the Mike Prince story line. Like a trio of plotters straight out of Shakespeare, Wendy, Wags and Taylor are constantly kibitzing in hopes of taking their dreaded boss down before he can win the White House. In this episode, they adopt a two-pronged strategy. While Wags whispers in the ear of Kate Sacker, Mike’s formidable legal counsel, so that she’ll drop him for her own congressional run, Wendy orchestrates a disastrous quasi-focus group with Prince Cap employees, all of whom kiss Prince’s posterior when he’s in the room. (They describe him as an egomaniac who loves the smell of his own flatulence when he’s not.)The ploy is meant to shake the confidence of Prince, who loves himself and is convinced everyone else either feels the same way or simply needs to get to know him better. To learn that his biggest earners think he’s a narcissist with a God complex is a body blow to his self-esteem — potentially enough to persuade him to call off his presidential campaign.But Wendy and company didn’t count on Mike’s wife, Andy, nor on Kate’s master-of-the-universe father, Frank (Harry Lennix). Andy tells Mike that people love him not because he is inherently lovable but rather because everyone loves a winner. That’s the air he needs to project during his upcoming televised speech, which he paid to have air in prime-time on every network. Frank tells Kate it’s always best to stick with a winner, even when the going gets tough, because association with a winner is what gets people to pick up the phone when you call.So Kate rescinds her resignation. Prince gives his big speech and reaps a huge bounce in the polls. Both Prince and his campaign guru, Bradford, praise Wendy for pulling off the exact opposite of what she intended. And Chuck stares nervously at Prince on his computer screen, clearly wondering if the time has already come to call in that favor from Axe.At this point in its run, “Billions” feels a bit like a spinning top starting to wobble — but I mean this as a compliment. There are only so many times the schemes of one of the show’s preposterously competent main characters can go right before they start to go disastrously wrong. Each meticulously plotted episode moves us incrementally closer to that tipping point.Loose changeIn a tertiary plot, Charles Rhoades Sr. asks Chuck to intervene in an acquaintance’s case of posthumous paternity (don’t ask). It turns out to be a cover for Charles’s feeling that he has lost of control over his legacy when he discovers his wife and daughter praying together — despite his insistence that their daughter be raised an atheist. As he does elsewhere with Triple H, Chuck consults an expert on control: Mistress Troy (Clara Wong), his former dominatrix. It is she who gives Chuck the idea to tell his dad to, in effect, stoop to conquer: Act acquiescent now, and he’ll wind up with a kid and wife who love him more, allowing him to exert more control in the longer term. Everyone’s a winner, again. Sort of.In addition to seeing the returns of Malkovich, Strong, Lennix and Servitto, this episode also welcomed back Rick Hoffman as the repugnant Dr. Swerlow, Charles’s … medical adviser, I guess? Wearing an Adidas tracksuit with “The Doc” monogrammed on it, Swerlow provides obscene expertise to anyone within a 20-foot radius — including Ira, whom he’s been providing with sublingual sexual performance-enhancing medication sub rosa for some time. Hence the videos from last week, I suspect.“When did I become Lex Luthor?” Mike asks Wendy plaintively. I dunno, Mike, probably when you decided to run for president as a bald billionaire, something the comic-book villain did over two decades ago. He won, too, if you can somehow imagine a United States of America willing to elect a wealthy megalomaniac as president. Try not to strain yourself.This week’s opening- and closing-credits needle drop: PJ Harvey’s brutally bitter alt-rock classic “Rid of Me.” It’s great to hear the song play while Paul Giamatti quietly emotes, though I maintain that hearing an unassuming friend absolutely tear through it at karaoke is the ideal way to experience it.Yes, that was President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine talking to Axe, but if you thought he might have better things to do than make a cameo on “Billions,” you would be correct. A Showtime spokesperson confirmed that the show edited existing footage of him into the episode. More

Half the traders at Prince Cap became involved in a plot against their boss. They just didn’t know it.Season 7, Episode 5: ‘The Gulag Archipelago’Let’s do a little narrative reverse engineering, shall we?Imagine, if you will, that you are a both a trader and a traitor — a high-powered executive at a major investment fund, looking to fatally undermine your own boss in order to stop him from becoming the president of the United States.Your Plan A, recruiting your even more dangerous old boss to stop him, has failed. You’re tired of waiting around for your performance-coach colleague, the ringleader of your band of mutineers, to generate a Plan B. It becomes clear that coming up with Plan C is up to you.So you generate some short-term, medium-term and long-term goals for this plan. In the short term, you need something that will cost your hated boss enough money to rattle his cage. In the medium term, you’d like to generate doubt and dissension among his key employees, as well as elsewhere on the Street. In the long term, you want to increase the power available to a member of your own inner circle to make mischief — enough power, you hope, to engineer the fatal mistake that will take your boss down for good.It isn’t revealed until the closing moments of this week’s episode of “Billions,” but this is precisely the action driving most of this week’s financial activity on the Prince Cap side of the story. It all looks innocent enough: Pivoting off a birthday balloon-inspired brainstorm by Dollar Bill, Taylor uncovers the opportunity to invest big in a helium processing start-up. The price of admission, however, exceeds that which Taylor and Philip are authorized to spend in the absence of their target — ahem, boss — Mike Prince, and his lieutenant, Scooter. Even after the formidable Victor somehow secures an extension of the investment window, it’s all a matter of sitting around, waiting for Mike and Scooter to answer their phones.And where are those phones? In a secure bag at a remote church where the rapper Killer Mike is previewing his new album. Mike and Scooter are determined to secure the artist-slash-activist’s endorsement, even though Mike’s campaign manager, Bradford, told them to steer clear of this thorny territory.Prince does wind up earning Killer Mike’s loyalty with a pledge to invest in several Atlanta-area, Black-owned banks, and Bradford is forced to give it up for his client’s sense of initiative. But Bradford should have stuck to his guns. In the time required to line up the Killer Mike’s support, Prince could have signed off on that big Helium start-up investment and reap over $1 billion in rewards. Indeed, the episode’s funniest moment comes when Scooter and Prince stroll happily out of that church, grab their phones and watch as dozens of notifications fill their home screens.Mike’s response to all this strikes me as the worst one possible. He admits that the structure he put in place isn’t tenable while he is out running for office, then grants Wags — a member of the conspiracy against him — the same sign-off power previously reserved for himself and Scooter. Beyond that, though, he refuses to accept any responsibility whatsoever, telling his crestfallen employees that if he had been in their shoes, he would have found a workaround — so why didn’t they? He even condescendingly tells them to treat this as a chance to learn from what it feels like to lose, as if he weren’t a loser right along with them, as if he weren’t the reason they lost.Which brings us back to those final moments. Turns out all of this, from the moment Dollar Bill divulged the original helium play, was a scheme on Taylor’s part. Taylor engineered the entire situation for this precise outcome: Wags gains power, and Prince loses prestige. Even though Wags and Wendy were kept out of the loop, they figured out what was going on — again, Taylor anticipated this — and kept quiet, allowing the plan to come to fruition.The idea that people who abuse their power might be brought low by those they trust is a deeply appealing, even cathartic one. We can’t stand people like Prince who have granted themselves the right to run our lives; surely, we think, neither can those whom they’ve trusted to help. It’s a fun and instantly recognizable note for “Billions” to play.But the show’s fingers are running all up and down the proverbial keyboard, bringing back long-forgotten leitmotifs. The actor Toby Leonard Moore, nearly unrecognizable beneath a beard, shaggy hair and a chef’s uniform, returns as Bryan Connerty, Chuck’s disgraced underling. Bryan’s ex-colleague and ex-girlfriend Kate dines at the hibachi restaurant where he has been working since his release from prison — a release accelerated thanks to Kate — in order to ensure he won’t be a liability when she runs for Congress. Connerty suggests that rather than cow him with threats, she should cajole him with incentives to play along, namely the restoration of his law license.One final old friend plays a major role in this episode: Ira, Chuck’s college bestie turned deputy at the Southern District. When a mugger steals his phone, Ira turns to Chuck to recover it — ostensibly because he has some sensitive documents and emails on it, but in actuality because he has been filming intimate videos with his wife, Taiga (Comfort Clinton), and doesn’t want them leaking.Recovering them takes some doing. It forces Chuck to tip his hand to two frenemies, the incoming New York police commissioner, Raul Gomez (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), and Attorney General Dave Mahar, that the phone is valuable. While Gomez chuckles about its contents with his buddies, Dave parlays this opportunity into a guarantee of playing first chair in any future legal action against Prince. It’s a huge concession on Chuck’s part, so huge that it gives Ira pause. In the past, Chuck has showed little compunction when it comes to messing with Ira’s life when there’s some greater good to be achieved. Why change now?“Because you’re my friend,” Chuck says, “and that’s my big picture now.” The two men then eat sweet potato pie together — a grace note, I hope, for their entire relationship, as “Billions” begins tying off its plot threads one by one.Loose changeI don’t know if it was the actor Comfort Clinton, the writer Amadou Diallo or some other party, but whoever decided to turn Taiga’s hug goodbye for Chuck into a borderline collapse onto his shoulders out of pure relief deserves serious kudos. That one little moment took a minor character who could be seen as the butt of one of the episode’s running jokes and turned her into a real person, experiencing real, relatable emotions. (Oh come on, like you’ve never been put in a compromising digital position before.)As far as depictions of the moral bankruptcy of power go, showing the incoming police commissioner screening someone’s private sex tapes for the amusement of his cop buddies at a soiree in honor of his swearing-in is going to be tough for “Billions” to top.I’m not sure how I feel about the composer Brendan Angelides’s decision to score the revelation of Ira’s sex tapes with boom-chikka-bowwow porn music, but I’m leaning toward “It’s funny, so it’s allowed.”I’m all for the episode’s tertiary plotline, the budding romance between Wendy and Bradford, but it reminds me that Wendy and Chuck’s sadomasochistic relationship is, at this point, the show’s biggest dropped ball. Other than using Chuck’s kink to write off Juliana Margulies’s character post-pandemic, this once-central aspect of the series — the show’s opening shot showed us Chuck in flagrante, remember — has completely fallen by the wayside.For having Dollar Bill, Victor, and Taylor talk with Chipmunk-esque helium voices, I salute this episode. That’s a bit that always works, or at least so I tell myself at parties. More

Mike sets a trap for a certain new U.S. attorney. At least he thinks he does.Season 7, Episode 3: ‘Winston Dick Energy’Chuck Rhoades is a man of action — most of the time. His proprietary blend of intellect and emotion is what made him the man he is today; his best friend and newly hired deputy U.S. attorney, Ira (Ben Shenkman), tells him this in so many words.But that combination has unmade Chuck several times over, and he’s not the only one who knows it. His protégé turned foe, Kate Sacker, tells her boss Mike Prince that Rhoades’s emotion is what stops him from harnessing his full intelligence, which is every bit the equal of hers or Mike’s. So when Kate and company proffer a filing for a political super PAC to back Prince’s presidential campaign — a deliberate provocation meant to keep Chuck’s operations in plain sight — Chuck does not bite.Which would be fine if Chuck were operating in a vacuum. Instead, he has an office full of lawyers champing at the bit for the opportunity to unleash their full skills on unsuspecting white-collar criminals everywhere — the kinds of cases that turned their freshly reinstated boss into a beloved man of the people. His reticence in choosing his opening salvo frustrates everyone: his right-hand man, Ira; his father, Charles Sr. (Jeffrey DeMunn); his button man, Karl; and the Southern District’s bold up-and-comer Amanda Torre (Hannah Hodson).Given his overall winning track record, Chuck’s colleagues understandably want him to aim at a target, any target, and pull the trigger. Karl, Ira, and Charles père even enlist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (appearing as himself) for a pep talk, staged in Grant’s Tomb no less. (Watching Chuck extrapolate a whole grandiose rationale behind the location’s selection before finding out the real reason is one of the episode’s funnier and more insightful moments.)And so the writer of the episode, Mae Smith, sets up an exciting dilemma. We viewers know that Chuck’s braintrust is well-intentioned and that their admiration for Chuck as a hard charger is both genuine and, 99 times out of a hundred, well-placed. We viewers also know that this is the one-in-a-hundred case, and that if he does what has always served him best, he’ll fall right into Prince’s trap. It’s clever writing, building tension by ensuring both of Chuck’s possible choices seem wise from different angles but never revealing the correct angle to the character himself.In the end, Chuck’s perspicacity serves him well. He deliberately takes Prince’s super PAC bait but instructs Karl and Ira to keep digging. Then he selects Amanda’s case for his real first big win. He is still the emotional intellectual we know and love, but he now has the power to keep that emotion in check until needed — kind of like the Hulk in “Avengers.”Chuck isn’t the only character at a crossroads this episode. His ex-wife, Wendy, discovers that nearly all of her patients at Prince Cap are seeing a second psychiatrist on the side for “real” therapy. Unwilling to accept that what she does is mere performance coaching — and more than a little jealous that her fief has been raided — she makes an appointment to confront the interloper, Dr. Eleanor Mayer (Holland Taylor) … and winds up becoming one of the good doctor’s patients.Mayer, it happens, really has Wendy’s number. She correctly points out that performance-based therapy necessarily requires continued high performance, a goal prioritized at the expense of anything that might free her Prince Cap clients from their “hamster wheel.” She also ferrets out that this leaves Wendy feeling one of two ways: like an “errand girl,” doing her bosses’ bidding to keep the cash flowing, or “Christlike,” suffering in order to save her patients’ souls to whatever extent she can. Perhaps Mayer’s therapy will offer a way out for all of them.The third and final character in search of his lost mojo in this week’s episode is Wags. Once a legend on the Street, his association with a do-gooding politician has sunk his reputation in the eyes of his fellow creeps and killers. Like Chuck, he needs a big score, a sure thing, a way to get back on the map in spectacular, even theatrical, fashion.Then along comes Winston (Will Roland). A twerpy quant who’s been a core part of the Taylor Mason team for some time, largely in spite of himself, Winston quits the firm and immediately — like, within eight hours — goes into business for himself. The risk management software he is peddling was obviously designed on Prince Cap time and on the Prince Cap dime; if he’s allowed to sell it, the financial and reputational damage to the firm would be considerable.Acting on advice from Wendy (you can see why Dr. Mayer is concerned, no?), Wags storms into Winston’s apartment, where an attempted come-to-Jesus meeting with Taylor and Philip is already underway, and all but attacks the guy. His real purpose, though? Planting a bug on behalf of Hall (Terry Kinney), the firm’s mercenary investigator. Hall digs up not only Winston’s potential client list but also every dirty deed (and dirty Google search) the one-time hacktivist has ever committed.All of which information Wags, Taylor, Philip and Kate present to Winston in the very conference room where he is to make his final pitch to potential buyers. Unless he comes back to Prince Cap, software in tow, as a sort of indentured servant, Wags will see to it personally that Winston’s reputation and finances are left about as intact as ancient Carthage.Watching a good episode of “Billions,” which this undoubtedly is, is like watching someone expertly play a puzzle game — solving a Rubik’s cube, say, or beating a level of “Tetris.” You gaze in admiration as skilled hands slide pieces and panels from one place to the next until everything lines up exactly where it should. Chuck’s friends and enemies inadvertently guide him to the correct course of action. Wendy’s petulance puts her on the path toward a major breakthrough. Winston’s defection provides Wags with the fresh kill he requires. “Billions” makes it look easy, but if it were, everyone would be doing it.Loose changeNotably absent from this episode, barring a pointed glance or pained look here and there: Taylor, Wendy and Wags’s quest to stop their boss’s rise to power. Perhaps, chastened by Axe’s rejection last week, they’ve taken his “if you can’t beat him, join him” advice to heart, at least temporarily. (Also notably absent: Axe.)Notably present in this week’s episode: the much-missed Sarah Stiles as Bonnie. The profane Axe Cap alumna returns to her old stamping grounds to narc on Winston’s new venture, then rekindles her affair with Dollar Bill before the elevator doors close on her.Another key informant in the anti-Winston campaign: Rian, who doesn’t let her kinda-sorta sisterly affection for the little worm get in the way of nuking his dreams when Wags comes asking around.Key cameos in this episode include the author Michael Lewis as himself, hosting the “Liar’s Poker” soiree at which Wags is humiliated, and the talented character actor Michael O’Keefe as the jerk who does the humiliating. (By the way, when he and his buddies were swapping old Wags war stories, did they remind you, too, of the old Bill Brasky sketches on “Saturday Night Live”?)“What’s with you?” Wendy asks Wags. “Nothing,” he mumbles, eyes downcast, desultorily dipping a tea bag in a mug of hot water over and over. He’s been Tom Hagen’d out of the initial run at Winston by Taylor and Philip, and he’s having himself a good old-fashioned childlike sulk about it. And why not? Life is nothing to Wags if not a big NC-17-rated playground, and he’s just been knocked off the monkey bars.Without going into detail, this episode features an off-color joke about the life and death of Ivanka Trump in such gleefully bad taste that I laughed at the audacity as much as at the joke itself.Before Wags takes charge of the operation, there’s some concern in the Prince Cap inner circle about destroying Winston publicly. Mike is running for president, after all, and America is a very pro-labor environment these days. More

Who’s the most terrifying egomaniac in the series right now? It might not be Mike Prince.Season 7, Episode 2: ‘Original Sin’A man’s home is his castle. It’s a comforting, if patriarchal and consumerist, cliché. In Bobby Axelrod’s case, it just happens to be true. His home is a castle. In this week’s episode of “Billions,” it serves as the reunion site for his Knights of the Round Table, on a mission to bring their Arthur back from Avalon and take up the sword once more.The target of this trio of do-gooders — one of them a guy who may never have done good before in his life, mind you — is the would-be future leader of the free world, Mike Prince. Wendy, Taylor and Wags have all come to the conclusion that keeping Prince out of the Oval Office is even more important than, get this, making money. They all make this case to their old boss in turn, each employing a different strategy and skill set, each yielding the same result: He’ll pass.In point of fact, he’s more interested in getting the band back together right there in Castle Axelrod, side by side with his chip-off-the-old-block son, Gordy (Jack Gore) — and far from the U.S. government, Prince, Chuck and everyone else who is out to get him.Even after all three turn him down, so insistent are they that Prince must be stopped, he still doesn’t get the picture. His advice? If you can’t beat him, join him, at least until he’s in the White House and out of your hair. Like so many of the mega-rich, he can’t see the forest fire for the trees.Although Prince is presented as the clear and present danger, it’s Chuck who frightened me more this week. Simply put, the man has gone beast mode. Despite signing an agreement to play along with Dave’s scheme and act like an indicted man, he engineers a public-relations campaign so successful she had no choice but to drop the charges, leaving her to rue their erstwhile alliance and making him an enemy. (I’d say “for life,” but no one stays enemies for life on this show.) Despite having helped put his one-time foe, the former attorney general Jock Jeffcoat (Clancy Brown), behind bars, he makes the man an offer so compelling (in the form of new cowboy boots) that the fire-breathing Jeffcoat records a mea culpa admitting he wrongfully fired Chuck from his job.And despite having heard directly from the president — via their intermediary, Solicitor General Adam DeGiulio (Rob Morrow) — that there’s no chance he’ll get back his old U.S. attorney job, the exonerations plus the good P.R. make his reinstatement a no-brainer. Indeed, there’s an almost fiery swagger to Paul Giamatti’s performance as Chuck in this episode, a self-confidence extraordinary even by Chuck’s standards. What’s that everyone’s been saying about a man who believes he can do no wrong?Indeed, Chuck reminds me of no one so much this week as Victor. Once described by Axe as “my stone and steely assassin,” he’s the most ethically dubious trader of the bunch, which is saying something; his mirthless, severe face gives him the air of a guy who could kill a man without raising his own pulse rate. Victor lands Mike the killer investment he’s been looking for — a purported miracle medical device — by blackmailing a doctor involved in its manufacturer’s research.Who tipped off Prince to this problem in the making, prompting him to let this practitioner of the dark arts sort it all out? A hot shot political consultant named Bradford Luke (Babak Tafti), who spends much of the episode mentally sparring with Mike in order to feel out whether the billionaire is worth his time. Luke suggests that Prince’s route to the presidency runs along “the Eisenhower Path,” which means establishing unquestioned pre-eminence in his field. Mike needs to make a killing the likes of which the market has never seen, all according to strict moral guidelines. (This is the exact combination of goals a firm run by Philip and Taylor in tandem can deliver, by the way; that’s a smart bit of setup.) And if making an ethical fortune means allowing traders like Victor and Dollar Bill to behave unethically in the process, so be it.Luke’s other concern is Prince’s wife, Andy (Piper Perabo). Their marriage is an uncommon one by most American standards, separated as they are by most of the continent in terms of living arrangements. They have a plan for that. But Bradford figures out quickly that their relationship isn’t merely long-distance, it’s also sexually open.In a very funny bit of business, the consultant makes them both type a list of their sexual partners on their phones and turn them over to him for inspection and approval. I’m curious what he thought of the presence of the Prince Cap employee Rian (Eva Victor) on Mike’s list … and what Mike thought of the fact that it took Andy longer to type hers than it took him to type his.Speaking of love — kind of, anyway — I do have one major source of frustration with this episode: the relationship between Bobby and Wendy, or rather the lack thereof. Twice now, “Billions” has introduced the idea of a romantic entanglement between the two, paying off years of tension, only to immediately dismiss the idea. It did so first during Axe’s departure, where they confess their feelings for each other but say goodbye without so much as a kiss; the writers do it again here, reuniting them but pre-empting the possibility of anything more than friendship by having them say they’re both different people than they were a couple of years ago.I’m sorry, but from the moment they confessed their feelings, I simply haven’t bought that these two intelligent, attractive, passionate people who love each other, built an empire together and are accustomed to achieving everything they set out to do would ever look into each other’s eyes and say, “Thanks but no thanks.”Loose changeThis episode served as a reminder of just how deep the “Billions” bench goes: There’s Morrow and Brown as DeGiulio and Jeffcoat; Allan Havey as Chuck’s mild-mannered fixer Karl and Stephen Kunken (in full “Tunnel of Love”-era Bruce Springsteen attire) as the repulsive compliance officer Ari Spyros; and even Lily Gladstone, who already has Oscar buzz for her coming role in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” pops up every now at Rhoades family dinners.It took a while, but Philip finally clicked for me this week. It’s in his withering delivery of “Skipped a step!” when he catches Victor going over his head. It’s in how he charges into a risky game of luck with Dollar Bill, knowing the only way he can win is to cheat, and knowing that cheating to win will, paradoxically, win Bill to his side. It’s in his willingness to bigfoot people about ethics one day, then encourage them to win at all costs (save getting caught) the next. The writing in this episode, by Emily Hornsby, shows that Philip really is a killer; the actor Toney Goins may not look the part, but I’m starting to suspect that’s deliberate.It is so good to have Damian Lewis back. Watch him as he makes his pitch for Wags, Wendy and Taylor to stay: His body has the whiplash-quick movement, his eyes the terrible mirth, of a Steven Spielberg velociraptor. Our trio wouldn’t be recruiting Axe so much as unleashing him.“You’re just like them,” Mike must tell the people, Bradford says. But Mike must also convey that he is “nothing like them,” that he is “their better, who will protect them and lead them while at least understanding them.” I take back what I said about both Chuck and Victor: The consultant is the scariest person on this show.I know “Poker Face” used it first, but playing Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game” as the three musketeers depart England defeated makes for one of my favorite needle drops in the history of the show. As gorgeously sad as it gets. More